Jolly Green Giant – “I Stand for Goodness”
Another broccoli story: Imagine a dinner table, circa 1968, in a small suburban tract home outside L.A. (Let Mad Men do the decorating in your mind.) On television, Walter Cronkite reads the news from Vietnam; on the screen, helicopters dip low into the jungle to receive their daily cargo of bodies. We watch this every night with dinner. Bon appetit.
My mother serves supper as early as she can. My father only permits himself to drink between the time he arrives home from his job and the time my mother puts dinner on the table. She tries to set out the first course –salad, iceberg lettuce–before he can a pour a third gin and tonic.
My father loves my mother’s cooking. He is unfailingly complimentary. This pleases her because she knows he comes from a family of good cooks–exacting Danish housewives capable of incredible feats of culinary fancy. Tonight, however, when she sets his plate before him–steak, Uncle Ben’s Converted rice, and, for what seems like the 20th time that week, broccoli–he freezes.
He looks at the broccoli, swallows hard and picks up his fork–he has never once in the history of their marriage criticized her cooking–then his hand falls back to the table.
“I can’t do it. I can’t eat broccoli one more time.”
Behind him the television flickers–the waving green of the rice paddies, the whirring blades, the rat-a-tat of gunfire, the bloody bodies.
For the next 44 years, until my father dies at the age of 94, he and I taunt my mother with our shared hatred broccoli: “It’s all your fault,” we say, “We haven’t liked broccoli since 1968.”
i hate vegetables cookbook 